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Comment by willvarfar | Hacker News Reader

I would guess it is a tariff thing rather than NATO. Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?

Definitely no. At least not where I am from. America is just as bad s China, Russia or all the other freaks terrorising our world.

Edit:// I also don't know when this believe ever should have existed. Or why it would have existed in the first place

The US has been like that for a long time. But Western European and American interests were well aligned for a couple decades. First the whole WW2 business. Then Western Europe needed funds for rebuilding and a strong deterance against further expansion of the Soviet Union, while the US felt threatened by the idea of communism. Then in the early 90s we had a couple years where we had common ground in commercializing and integrating post-Soviet states.

During the Bush and Obama eras Europe was at least important as a staging ground for war in the Middle East, but the US wants to get away from putting boots on the ground there.

But now most of the common ground is gone, and the gloves are coming off

You talk about Europe as it were a single country. I live in Switzerland and basically nothing of what you say is or was true here. What you describe is losing the few allies you had here, not "Europe". Trump is using these words so wrongly it hurts. There never was a common Europe on Americas side to begin with.

A few? NATO has 29 European member countries. It's larger than the European Union.

How you feel makes sense though. The US does not and has never had Switzerland's back (and vice-versa).

It is a tariff thing.

Nobody's under any illusion that this was a good decision, including the people that made this decision. It was just a means to an end, the end being lowering tarrifs on the EU.

There's still quite a few steps between the current state and the dominance of US cars on European streets. It's still an empty promise from the EU side.

> Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?

Can't speak for my whole country, but the opinion among the people in my age group at least is that the US would expect a ROI on military interventions in Europe

Maybe. Maybe not. The uncertainty has value in and of itself, assuming Russia et al. experience the same uncertainty.

> Is anyone in Europe really believing the USA still has our back?

Pretty much every government unfortunately.

I think they're just looking 3 years ahead.

Are you German by change? There is barely any America positive sentiment in our media anymore as far as I can tell, since the last time orange man won (which been a while).

From the media I can see it's only Germany who has a really weird relationship with the US. Switzerland, Italy, France, .. are pretty clear in what they think and how they will act.

No I'm French, and we always had mixed feelings with the Americans. But for anyone following the topic, it's pretty clear that most other European governments are still pretty convinced that they just need to brace for the next three years and appease Trump.

See the debates about how the European funds (ReArm Europe) should be spent, and whether or not it should be allowed to be used to buy US equipment. Or the recent procurement of additional F35 (at least Belgium, Netherlands, Italy and Germany have ordered more).

Also, none of the re-arming plans seem to consider the assumption that the US logistics (airlift & tankers) could not be relied on.

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